Norie Sato

Seattle-based artist Norie Sato’s work includes national projects encompassing transit, parks, libraries, universities, infrastructure, airports, and other civic structures. She strives to add meaning and a sense of the human touch to the built environment through her work. She works begin with context-driven ideas, and then she finds the appropriate form and materials, such as sculpture, glass, terrazzo floors, integrated design work, landscape, video, and light. Sato helped to craft policies for Seattle’s seminal public art program in the 1970s as a member of the Seattle Arts Commission. Her public art works include commissions in Seattle, Miami, Salt Lake City, Federal Way (Washington), Portland, Ames, Madison, Tempe, and Spokane.

For more than 25 years, her public artworks have been both temporary and permanent and have incorporated individual, collaborative, and design team work, and planning projects. In 1997, she received the George Tsutakawa Award for Advancement of Public Art from Allied Arts in Seattle and the Golden Trowel Award from the Masonry Institute in Wisconsin for her floor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.